In 1972, a Soviet Jewish systems engineer named Yitzchak Kogan found out that the technology he was working on was being shipped to Egypt and Syria. Unable to stomach the idea of aiding the Jewish state’s enemies, he applied for permission to leave for Israel. Although fourteen years elapsed before he and his wife obtained exit visas, they were immediately fired from the jobs. The two returned to Russia in 1991, just five years after gaining their freedom, and Kogan became the rabbi of a Moscow synagogue, and remains active in Jewish communal and religious life.

From his childhood on, Kogan—known among Chabad Ḥasidim as the tsaddik (righteous man) of Leningrad—obtained a Jewish education and observed Jewish practices in defiance of the regime, and sometimes at great personal risk. Dovid Margolin writes:

As soon as Kogan began attending Soviet public school, his parents hired the first of a string of m’lamdim, Jewish religious teachers, to come to their home. . . . It was not only what the old men taught Kogan that he absorbed, but what they left unsaid. Each of them, without exception, had suffered for his beliefs at the hands of the Communist regime. [One] teacher, Rabbi Berel Medalia, was the son of Rabbi Shmarya Leib Medalia, a Lubavitcher Ḥasid who served as chief rabbi of Moscow before being arrested and executed by Stalin in 1938; three of Rabbi Shmarya Leib’s sons were likewise arrested. Berel Medalia served something like a decade in the Gulag system. . . . Despite everything, in addition to teaching children like the Kogans, over the years Medalia became a quiet Jewish influence on many young refuseniks.

As Kogan’s bar mitzvah approached in the summer of 1959, his mother feared the ceremony would summon unwanted interest from the authorities, and turned to the recently released [from imprisonment] Rabbi Moshe Mordechai Epstein for advice. Epstein instructed her to hold the bar mitzvah in a small summer vacation town outside Leningrad. “He also said that Papa shouldn’t be there,” Kogan explains. “Instead of my father, Rabbi Epstein made the Barukh she-p’tarani [the blessing a father recites at his sons’ bar mitzvah].”

Kogan would later train to be a ritual slaughterer, in order to provide Leningrad’s Jews with kosher meat, and served as a sort of unofficial rabbi for his fellow refuseniks:

Among the many young Jewish refuseniks who credit the Kogans’ assistance on their path to Judaism were Lev and Marina Furman, who first connected with them in 1974. They would recall joining about 50 others at the Kogans’ apartment for their first kosher Passover seder. Other communal activities at the Kogan home included Hebrew and Jewish study circles and Purim shpils.

In 2003, the Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi, spooked by the American display of might in Iraq, decided to destroy or surrender his entire nuclear program. Informed observers have suggested that the deal he made with the U.S. should serve as a model for any agreement with Iran. Robert Joseph provides some useful background:

Gaddafi had convinced himself that Libya would be next on the U.S. target list after Iraq. There was no reason or need to threaten Libya with bombing as Gaddafi was quick to tell almost every visitor that he did not want to be Saddam Hussein. The images of Saddam being pulled from his spider hole . . . played on his mind.

President Bush’s goal was to have Libya serve as an alternative model to Iraq. Instead of war, proliferators would give up their nuclear programs in exchange for relief from economic and political sanctions.

Any outcome that permits Iran to enrich uranium at any level will fail the one standard that President Trump has established: Iran will not be allowed to have a nuclear weapon. Limiting enrichment even to low levels will allow Iran to break out of the agreement at any time, no matter what the agreement says.

Iran is not a normal government that observes the rules of international behavior or fair “dealmaking.” This is a regime that relies on regional terror and brutal repression of its citizens to stay in power. It has a long history of using negotiations to expand its nuclear program. Its negotiating tactics are clear: extend the negotiations as long as possible and meet any concession with more demands.